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Most
of us have heard the terms mental illness or mental disorder or
psychiatric condition. These terms are used to describe a wide range of
different conditions but what they have in common is that they all
affect a person’s emotions, thoughts and behaviours — how they see
themselves, see the world around them, and how they interact in that
world. The key difference from “having a bad day or week” is both the
duration and magnitude of the impacts on your life.

There are many different kinds of mental disorders. One in five
Canadians, over the course of their lives, will experience a mental
illness and what that ultimately means is that every single family in
Canada will in some way be affected. There is nobody in Canada who can
stand up and say, “Not my family, not my aunts or uncles or cousins or
grandparents, children, siblings, spouse or self.”

And yet the reluctance to talk about mental illness, to acknowledge
it openly, to treat it as a form of human suffering like any other
illness, relates in part to how threatening this set of illnesses is
to our sense of who we are. Mental illness cuts across all age, racial,
religious, or socio-economic categories.

The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that by the year 2020
depression will become the No. 2 cause worldwide of years lost due to
disability. That’s a profound impact.

The number of suicides in Canada is almost 4,000 people a year. For
people aged 15 to 24 in Canada, suicide is the No. 2 cause of death.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) mental illness is
the number one leading cause of disability in the world and five of the
10 leading causes of disability are related to mental disorders.

Mental illness costs the Canadian economy a staggering $51-billion a
year, and each day 500,000 people will miss work due to mental health
problems.

Each year employers and insurers spend a whopping $8.5 billion on long-term disability claims related to mental illness.

Mental illness is the number one cause of disability in Canada,
accounting for nearly 30% of disability claims and 70% of total costs.
Mental health disorders in the workplace cost Canadian companies nearly
14% of their net annual profits and up to $16 billion annually.

The unemployment rate among people with serious mental illness is 70 -
90%. There is a 60% drop in family income when a breadwinner is
diagnosed with mental illness.